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Monthly Archives: August 2024

aerosol

August 24, 2024
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tiny droplets hang in air/it’s an antiperspirant/flammable yet debonair/for the pit-stink curst (we’re blunt)

garden hose-stream plugg’d with thumb/rainbow’d in the midst of mist/odd as mined molybdenum/thumber feels like he’s been kissed

Afterword: When visiting one of my California cousins and watering her back yard, I relearned the fun fact that rainbows are available rain or shine with water from a garden hose, your thumb, and the just-right angle relative to the light source. That’s where the second stanza came from. As for the first stanza, I challenged myself to make a fairly decent rhyme for antiperspirant and now wonder if I’ve made poetic history. 🙂

Other Uses for Socks

August 23, 2024
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“You see, they get holes in them.” Albert Einstein, explaining why he never wore socks

If everyone stopped wearing socks and yet sockmakers maintained manufacture

One way to put them to use would be to sew bunches of them into throw-pillow-like gizmos that would follow fall-prone people around using Roomba technology, so that when the person fell it would zip under them, thereby preventing bruise and fracture.

We could also make everything from handguns to cannons that were designed based on T-Shirt-Cannon technology to harmlessly and via compressed air fire projectiles made out of socks that are soft and fluffy,

And then melt down or otherwise repurpose all ordnance capable of killing people, and when the gun nuts go ballistic so to speak say Hey, reread the Second Amendment, which gives you the right to bear arms but never breathes a word about what KIND of arms, have a free Sock-Shooter and stop being huffy.

With enough socks you can make a megacushion that would unsplat your landing even if you fell off a steeple,

You could make car-muffler cozies that shut off the car engine if the muffler noise exceeded 60 decibels, protecting pedestrian hearing and ticking off the loud-car people;

And I am no inventor but give funding to anyone willing to follow the mandate of using socks to make the world more benign

And soon all would turn warm and fuzzy and truly fine.

Afterword: Fans of the late, great Ogden Nash will recognize my attempt to adopt his style. His whimsical poetry truly made the world a more warm and fuzzy place. How I miss him!

flitting impulses

August 22, 2024
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for certain improprieties

loose change will make a sin a breeze

in other climes and rhymes betimes

tenacity will ring your chimes. well

travelogued, your journeys; you

instinctively appoint a view/help

nested townsfolk rarefy/from

getting down to getting hi

Afterword: This whimsical down-one-side-and-up-the-other Double Acrostic is not quite nonsense; it makes a flitting sort of sense if you consider that the poem tells you with its title that it is about impulsivity. The poem came to be after it occurred to me that though the phrase “fleeting impulse” is as old hat as the phrase “old hat,” the phrase “flitting impulse” may be more apt, implying as it does quick and jerky motion rather than sudden evaporation, and yet an Internet search yields far fewer instances (but it delights me to see that there ARE such instances!) of the latter than the former.

Constructing the poem with a consistent rhyme and meter was a fun challenge. Thank Goodness for the forward-slash line break symbol that lets me break to the next line while staying on the line! 🙂

Perhaps This Trinket

August 22, 2024
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Through chances innumerable

We have arrived,

You the explorer, the seeker of newness,

I the content creator

Hoping to not waste your time.

We both traffic in messages in bottles,

You now adding traces of my thoughts

To the trove of otherness

Stored in electrochemical array

Gift-wrapped within the dura mater

Of your skull

And you are changed at least as much

As the orbit of the Moon above was changed

By our flybys and landings,

But your orbit abides, nested in your aspirations, rhythmed by your schedule, soothed by evidence such as this

That someone cares to help you be more

Than alone.

Perhaps this trinket of good wishes for you,

Which cost me some stretching and finger taps

And you a small bouquet of time and attention

Will be retrieved for your focus

A time or two hence.

Perhaps not. There are better uses of your time.

It and I will abide there, though,

Behind the orbits

That nest your eyes.

cache

August 21, 2024
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opening the suitcase revealed encased treasure/in the form of clean near-new clothing/packed for a trip/i had taken early this year

i had gotten home and not unpacked/and after that had used the suitcase/as a stand for my work clothing

here was a collarless shirt I had thought lost/and a hawaiian shirt i had forgotten existed/and underwear made of genuine cloth and not/the stretchy plastic schlock they hawk nowadays

it was delightfully like a time capsule/so when i got home after this trip/i on purpose didn’t unpack it again

cache me if you can

straws and doughnuts

August 20, 2024
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topologically speaking/straws and doughnuts are identical

you may think a straw has two holes/and a doughnut one/but fuse a stack of doughnuts/and you have an impractical straw

and shorten a straw and thicken its wall/and you see more easily/that the two holes are really one

another commonality of straws and doughnuts/is that they may both convey unneeded sweetness

also, they both have a history/with predecessors much different/from today’s versions

for instance the sumerians of thousands of years ago gathered around vats of fermented beerlike stuff/and used super-long straws to communally drink/the vats being too heavy to move

and the early doughnuts/came to new amsterdam from dutch immigrants/in the form of olykoeken (“oil cakes”)/which lacked holes/and were often nut-filled

and folk rumor credits a sailor/one captain gregory hansen/with putting a hole in them/to facilitate even frying

both straws and doughnuts have been metaphorized/curiously though it is the natural hay-derived straw/that is the last straw or the short straw/or the straw that broke the camel’s back/or the straw in the wind

curiously as well it is the hole in the doughnut/and not the doughnut itself/that is metaphorized/when for instance discussing medical expenses/not covered by medicare

but the most colorful instance of rude dismissal/(effword alert)/is a metaphor of the doughnut itself/and in the public domain for years/before Kurt Vonnegut used it/in one of his novels:

“why don’t you take a flying fuck/at a rolling doughnut?”

fun fact: i am in the lobby/of my apartment complex/where property management has placed free doughnuts/and coffee/and i just finished a third doughnut/in full sight of the guy in the office/who last late july/stuck me with a $9.99 transaction fee/when i paid online/after he wouldn’t take my personal check

and so i determined to eat and drink/$9.99 worth of doughnuts and coffee

because that transaction fee/was the straw that broke the gary’s back

and if he doesn’t like it/i think i hear/the subtle rustle of a rolling doughnut/heading his way

the goods

August 19, 2024
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it is late/and i have just bidden a pal good night/and silently told her sweet dreams/for we are unromantic friends/wishing each other well/without exes and ohs

shakespeare sure got “sweet sorrow” right

in grade school they taught us that “goodbye” was dialogue shorthand for “may god be with you”

tolkien had his eagles say “fare you well wherever you fare until your aeries receive you at journey’s end”

and in france there are many ways to say goodbye including “[be] with god” and “until we meet again”

and goodness is the implied cosmic force

good god good grief good gravy goodness gracious good in bed good golly good to be alive good for you good on you g’day mate

i’ll finish this when i am good and ready

and since you are

now would be good

Additive Sculpting

August 19, 2024
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The potter uses his wire tool to wire off about a third of a 25-pound bag of Cone 5 B Mix clay. He subdivides and wedges this into four roughly equal lumps.

At the potter’s wheel, he gets the wheel spinning/Slams one of the lumps onto the batt on the wheelhead/Wets his hands, centers the clay, and flattens and spreads it until it is a disc about half an inch thick and just shy of the diameter of the batt. He remove the disc-topped batt from the wheelhead and puts on another batt.

Centering another clay lump, he drives his thumbs down its middle. He spreads his thumbs to open the floor of the vessel, and pulls up its wall until it is about seven inches high. Soon he has a vase with an elegant out-in-flute curve and a smooth, friendly lip. He carefully cuts the vase free of the batt with his wire tool and puts the vase aside.

Now some freeform sculpting of/Banjo player, stool and love/Seeger-like but with cigar/Skinny/Beard up/Tatts and scar

One lump to go. The banjo player need a banjo, a dog, and a microphone with stand. Cordage/Is tricky/So he tries to fake it/With an implied coil snaking around the pole of the stand/But no dice so what the hell it’s cordless/But the dog is easy/Homage to his beloved companion, now gone nine years…

The disc batt goes back on the wheel and he makes it look like a vinyl LP including title of song (“Sand Land”) and the name of the artist (“Arch Welder”) and other indicia. He paints the disc with black and red stains and then increases the spin speed/And incises an impossible, unplayable, crisscrossing groove into the black-stained area.

Now he needs slip, a lot of it. There is almost enough slurry in the bottom of his water bucket. He puts it in a Dixie cup and adds clay and water until it is the viscosity of Elmer’s Glue./Then he uses a tool like a brush but with metal bristles and scratches up the surfaces that the slip will/Adhere. Outsized vase, stool, microphone stand and banjo player all all affixed/To the faux vinyl disc/Floor.

His back hurts. He glances up at the wall clock. Almost six well-sculpted hours have passed.

The Nose-Grabber Never Hurts

August 18, 2024
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The Nose-Grabber Never Hurts

The toddler begins to speak
And the papa begins to entertain
The stroller yields thrills with kinetic energy
And tilt in a 50-yard mad dash
Dubbed the “Wheelie Whee”

And then there are Gheeps and Teekos
And Raspberries on Thee Tummy
All yielding gales of giggles

But there is a modest lesson in compassion
With the Nose-Grabber
Which is a clamp of sorts
Made from the victory fingers of the left hand
Applied to the nubnose of the toddler
For three or four seconds
With feather touch gentleness
And the papa somberly telling his child
“Remember: The Nose-Grabber Never Hurts.”

Alas, I the Nose-Grabber
DID hurt my child
Not with kinetic energy but with words
Not with name-calling
But with what she called “Yell Lectures”
And not with indifference
But insensitivity…

We are estranged now
For over three years.

Every day hurts
The Nose-Grabber.
He wishes his child well
From afar.

fat

August 18, 2024
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when we overeat and gain weight and do not buy larger clothing we sculpt ourselves with stored energy/overflowing the belts of our pants

if we do it quickly we decorate our flesh/with stretch marks and the subtle tattooing of burst capillaries

and if we continue such ill-advised behavior the stored energy becomes a vascular-wall encrustation that hampers plumbing, sometimes unto death

so we who cannot control our ingestation or do not metabolize our stored energy with exercise get tsktsked by our medical consultants who prescribe us symptom-handlers and not root-cause-managers

it is a hot fat mess

wellness concerns and fat-jiggling whilst looking into the bathroom mirror now tell me that rather than sleep another hour i really ought to gear up for the outside world and i here i am doing just that and hoping to be bursting out my front door before the top of the hour for some long slow distance

walk with me friend